


It Suits Her

by swooning



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-07
Updated: 2015-04-07
Packaged: 2018-03-21 19:29:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3703075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swooning/pseuds/swooning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So many serial murders, so little time. But with Eliot Ness to help pass that time, waiting for John to show up isn't as tedious as Helen sometimes finds it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Suits Her

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Geonn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Geonn/gifts).



The left suspender strap kept creeping off her shoulder. Most annoying. So was remembering to call the things “suspenders” instead of “braces,” but that was just America.

And the curls. The bob had been a bad idea, the oh-so-modern permanent wave a worse one. Helen brushed her hair behind her ears yet again, then started at a sudden brush of pressure on her head. Turning, she caught a smirk on the half-shadowed face next to her before the man shrugged.

“It looks better on you anyway.”

“But now you’re out without a hat. A respectable man like you.”

“Scandalous,” he agreed, not seeming too wildly put out.

Helen adjusted the brim on the fedora, admiring the texture of the heavy felt under her fingers. Quality. If Eliot wasn’t on his guard, she would keep the hat and no mistake.

“Why are we here, again, exactly?” he asked, peering up over the broad lip of the wooden chariot to gaze over the empty boardwalk and beach beyond. “Empty warehouses are more my style.”

“He has a flair for the dramatic,” Helen said wryly. “And he lives for irony. He knew I’d come eventually. He would find a site like this perfect. He’ll come back here, if only in hopes of a confrontation with me.”

Her companion snorted and shrugged back down into the shadowed depths of the chariot, leaning back against the seat. His stark gray suit and crisp white shirt looked incongruous against the gaudy paint and gilt of the carousel, even in the semi-darkness of the closed boardwalk.

Helen eased back down next to him and crossed her legs in front of her, aping his posture. Two sets of long legs, clad in nicely draped suiting. One charcoal, one black with a subtle dove-gray pinstripe. That was Helen’s, of course. She had agreed to the man’s suit, although wearing trousers still felt vaguely indecent to her. But she drew the line at wearing a cheap suit. She had found a tailor and had one altered, paying a premium for the rush job.

And now here they sat, waiting for the arrival of somebody one of them half-believed was dead, and the other half-believed was a myth.

“So I get that you’re Helen,” he said after another few minutes of companionable silence. “I gather that the famous Paul is no longer in the picture?”

He was referring, of course, to the Torso Killer’s fourth victim, the “Tattooed Man” who had yet to be identified. It had taken nearly two years for John’s clues to make their way from the slums of Cleveland to Helen’s ears at the Sanctuary, but she had little doubt of them. Among so many other tattoos, the police had hoped that the names “Helen & Paul” would provide a clue to who the victim was. But Helen knew better, because shortly before the man had been killed in 1936, she had enjoyed a brief but quite memorable tryst with a remarkable woman named Alice Paul. No beauty, but with a strength of character that could not be matched. And the most astonishing eyes…

John had never liked the notion of Helen with other women. She thought perhaps he feared this openness on her part was somehow a threat to his own primacy in her sexual history. If she could be happy with a woman, why would she need a man? John liked powerful women, but was disturbed by women he perceived as mannish. Therefore, it was “Helen & Paul” etched on the poor murder victim’s body shortly before he died, rather than “Helen & Alice.”

“You gather correctly, sir,” she said, and gave him a coy smile. The night was growing long, the vigil tedious. Helen wanted to see this tautly-wound man loosen his strings a little. He was so earnest, so solemn. She wondered what his reaction would be, if she…”Miss Paul is no longer in the picture. Ours was only a passing romance. But John holds his jealousy through the ages, I believe.”

She did not say that she meant this literally. No need to confuse the poor man, who had only recently learned of abnormals.

“I see.”

“And you? You haven’t spoken of Mrs. Ness.”

His tightened lips were evident, even in the dark. “There is no longer a Mrs. Ness. I had a divorce.”

It was a blunt statement of fact, a challenge, a confession. It was not something one heard often, even in the advanced moral looseness of the nineteen-thirties.

“I see. Well, this just grew a bit more interesting, didn’t it?”

 

* * * * *

 

“Another round, please, Eliot?”

“For the lady.”

He passed the little flask and Helen tipped it back quickly, no longer flinching at the burn. It was nearly dawn. If John had intended to show, he would have done it long since. They would have to look elsewhere, it seemed, for their killer. Or look another night.

Which meant the current night, or what remained of it, was more or less a wash in terms of law enforcement.

“The lady who knocks one back like a gentleman,” Ness said with clear admiration, taking back his flask and capping it carefully.

“The lady who hates dressing like a gentleman, though,” Helen admitted. “My braces keep falling down. And this hat was brilliant at first, now it’s just preposterous.”

“The hat looks very fine on you, in point of fact.”

“Well, still. The braces—”

“Are you talking about your suspenders?”

She gave a little mock growl and tugged on the offending support strap, only to find the other one sliding off its slender perch once its mate was righted.

“Here, take your jacket off,” Ness said helpfully. Helen eyed him with a touch of suspicion, but the fine shimmer of alcohol in her veins made her just impish enough to follow through. She suspected his ploy, pretended innocence, and shrugged the piece of neatly tailored wool off before looking up at Ness with wide expectant eyes.

“And now?”

“Now, you just…”

He slid both straps down at once, slowly, then pulled her hands and arms through to let the suspenders flop down into Helen’s lap. And then, when he smirked at her again, she smirked right back.

“And this helps the braces stay up how, precisely?” She was already leaning forward against the counter-pressure of her crossed legs. Leaning into range.

“That’s a few steps away yet. Just be patient. Next we need to loosen this.” With the swift, efficient motions of long practice, Ness pulled the tie from Helen’s neck and unbuttoned her shirt to mid-chest where he stopped with a quizzical look up at her.

“My female operative doesn’t have to do this. I don’t think she does, anyway.”

Helen shrugged. “I’m ill-equipped for dressing like a boy, Mr. Ness. Is this cause for complaint on your part?”

“Oh, sweet Lord no it is not.”

She had to help him removed the tightly wrapped bandages, in the end, and there was a certain amount of highly unprofessional giggling that took place during the process. Helen was pleased to have accomplished that much loosening up, at least, of the famous crimefighter who currently had his talented tongue down her throat.

“Eliot!” She gasped when they finally broke for air. “It’s nearly morning.”

“You’re right,” he agreed. He looked chagrined, and started to pull back. Helen stopped him by sliding her palm directly down the front of his trousers and gripping his prominent erection with a fierce interest.

“So we’ll have to hurry it up,” she clarified, unbuttoning her shirt the rest of the way.

He was easy to convince. She thought it had been awhile for the poor man, perhaps. He drank her like a parched man in the desert, her lips and her breasts and finally, shoving her pants down suspenders and all, her eagerly waiting sex. With one leg still swathed in a puddle of wool, the other nearly-naked limb propped on the bench seat of the carousel chariot, Helen was open to the elements and to Ness’s enthusiastic attentions. It passed her mind that perhaps her gaitered sock and man’s brogue were not the most attractive footwear for such an occasion. But Ness didn’t seem to mind, if indeed he noticed at all. He tongued her pussy with a single-minded focus that had Helen gasping and panting into a keen, sharp orgasm within minutes.

After that she couldn’t get him inside her fast enough. Fumbling hands dueled with his trousers and drawers (Helen realized she had forgotten at least that much in her haste to acquire a suitable wardrobe for the evening). Ness stole a kiss, greedy and grateful, and slid his hands around her to cup her arse and coax her legs even farther apart. The heights worked out. Helen tugged at his cock, pulling him closer still, and then he was pushing into her with a grunt.

Hot, wet, and forbidden. Delicious, though, every second of it. The sun would rise soon, the sky was already lightening in the east. Helen welcomed Ness into her body and savored each thrust as something uniquely real in her increasingly surreal life. Another man, pumping and groaning softly, drawing out the last tremors of her climax as he worked quickly toward his own. And then, just then, as the first ray of sunlight shot free from the horizon, he gave a harsh cry and emptied himself into her with a shuddering twist.

John never came that night. Helen did. Ness did. But John would arrive the following evening and lead Helen a merry, taunting chase through the rougher parts of Cleveland, until Ness was left far behind and Helen was thoroughly lost and quite disgusted with herself.

“Perhaps the next one should bear a reminder of your time with the local law enforcement, Helen.”

The voice rang out in the empty alley. He got her every time. It wasn’t fair, the teleportation. Nothing about John was fair, not even the fact that he was alive when he should be dead. John was the very model of the unreal man, but no matter how many real men she slept with Helen could never rid herself of wanting him.

“I can help you, John,” she said. It was what she always said. “Come back with me. Ness doesn’t have to know about it. He knows what you are, he’ll believe you escaped. But I think James and I may have devised a—”

“Still such an innocent, aren’t you, my dove? My angel?” Druitt separated from the shadows and drew closer, but still out of reach. “Hoping to save my soul? Yours seems in imminent danger these days, I should think. Fucking James, and heaven only knows who else? And then some woman, and now of all things a civil servant?” He tsked at her. “Standards, Helen. Standards.”

“John, this can’t go on. Things are changing too quickly for this. The world’s so small now. With telephones in every building, and the rail spreading everywhere. You won’t be able to hide forever. And we will have to hunt you down. If it happens that way there will be no hope left, none.”

“There has been no hope for me for a long time, Helen. But the world will never be too small to hide me.” He reached a hand out, silently daring her to flinch away. She stood her ground and let him touch, let him trace the curve of her cheek and run his finger over her lips. So gently, so tenderly, as if he were memorizing the shape until the next time.

And perhaps he was. He disappeared the next second, leaving Helen alone in the dark.

She wasn’t frightened. She knew that John, despite all he was, would still see that she arrived home safely. He had that peculiar honor, that pride in being her guardian angel. But only when he wanted to be.

Helen sighed and hoisted her suspender strap back up to her left shoulder. She wondered if it was remotely possible to find a cab in this part of town at this time of night. But then she heard sirens approaching, and realized with relief that Ness was still in pursuit. He would not find John, but at least he would find Helen.

She straightened the fedora on her head and sauntered back down the alley to the street to await her belated backup. With any luck, she would be back at the hotel in time for a decent breakfast. What would the concierge say, she wondered, if she strolled in to the lobby still wearing the suit?

 

**Author's Note:**

> (Geonn asked for Helen in a man's suit and tie, and possibly also a fedora. This fic isn't nearly as brilliant as the Helen/Tesla smut biscuit he kindly wrote me in return). 
> 
> Originally posted at sanctuaryfiction.net


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